Nancy Schatz is famous in Maine for the blueberry pie she learned how to make from her mother, who learned how to make it from hers. Here’s the recipe, which Nancy’s granddaughters have begun to master, too.

Grandparents matter in profound, enduring, and sometimes unexpected ways. That’s what I learned from these recordings, which were made by three American families for the oral history project StoryCorps.

The legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead was homeschooled for most of her childhood by her grandmother, an iconoclast who rejected rote instruction as “stultifying” and emphasized learning by doing instead.